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The Dark Side of Big Ben

03 Mar 2017

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The Dark Side of Big Ben

The idea of this painting came into my mind in 2015. I started working on this project that year when I was still in the tenth grade, but I stopped working on it when my laptop’s graphics card broke. I tried continuing this project in 2016 after I built my own PC. However, not much progress were made and I left it once more since I was more interested in other projects. Now, in 2017, I revisited this two-year-old project and finally finished it.

The idea is simple. I’ve always loved Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side of the Moon album, including its simple-but-bold artwork. Pink Floyd were an English rock band formed in London. There’s one iconic building in London that I’ve always had in mind: the Big Ben. In my mind, I easily pictured the Big Ben replacing the simple triangle in the album artwork. So, I googled for an image of the Big Ben and found the one that’s suitable for this project.

Then I looked at the album’s artwork for reference, and decided to mirror the Big Ben image to make the perspective more in line with the artwork.

Scanned image of the album art

Then I entirely worked on the lines in vector using almost just the pen tool. I worked on this for days but I lost count of the hours I worked on this project. Then finally, I finished it and the result is: